David Bowie's 'Heroes' Turns 40 Today!

Few members of 1977's pop music elite managed to escape the spit and vitriol of the exploding punk movement that sought to slaughter such sacred cows as Queen, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, but David Bowie didn't just emerge unscathed, he was openly adored by most of the punk community, including the Clash's Mick Jones, who considered Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson and major influence.

And let us not forget that Bowie's spiked Ziggy hair-do had been co-opted by punk fashion architects Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren.

So when Bowie's twelfth album, "Heroes", landed on record store shelves 40 years ago today, one can safely surmise that he not only had the ears of mainstream music fans around the world, but the punks as well.

One can't help wonder if the album wasn't a catalyst of sorts for the likes of the Clash, Wire, and Joy Division, who had initially embraced punk's D.I.Y. aesthetic, but came to strive for something more musically and artistically challenging.

Robert Fripp at Hansa Studios, Berlin

Bowie, himself, had been striving for something more artistic challenging after tiring of the Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke personas. By recruiting Roxy Music alumnus Brian Eno, producer Tony Visconti, and guitarist Robert Fripp, Bowie now had the crew by which he could go in search of uncharted musical waters.

The first results of his collaboration with Eno and Visconti had yielded the moody and musically schizophrenic Low album, which, despite being held in high regard today, had been quite the polarizing album for Bowie at the time of its release.

A lesser artist may have felt they'd satiated their need for experimentation and returned to safer ground, but Bowie's genius was in realizing that this futuristic musical palette that he and Eno had created could now be applied to a project that sought to explore a singular mood for the duration of the album.

Inspired heavily by Krautrock, Bowie and Eno never settle for mere imitation, instead using the same synthesizers and studio effects as the likes of Neu! and Kraftwerk to augment what is essentially a band performance, albeit one very much in the studio realm. The album's secret weapon, of course, is Robert Fripp, who had to be lured out of retirement. His participation after a three-year sabbatical from playing guitar gives the album an organic intensity that had been in short supply on Low.

Little known non-fact: Heroes was initially a dueling pianos project!

While the title cut would go on to become one of Bowie's most popular compositions, the album itself barely cracked the U.S. Top 40, thereby ending his string of consecutive Top 20 albums.

More importantly, it laid out the groundwork for the post-punk movement at a time when punk was still flying high, proving yet again that Bowie was not a man beholden to trends, musical or otherwise.